Perlmann gave Sandra a big tip when she brought him the cigarettes that she had bought in the Piazza Veneto. Then he went on flicking through the book. Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations. Perlmann greedily read the article about Khrushchev’s demands and the failure of his trip. And the next two pages, entirely devoted to John F. Kennedy’s election as president, he read as if they contained revelations about his own life.
When the restaurant began filling up, he barely noticed, but just changed irritably to the other side of the table, so that he had the wall in front of him. With great attention he read every single name on the list of Kennedy’s cabinet, and then it continued into the next year: Gagarin in space; Cuban invasion of the Bay of Pigs; building the Berlin Wall.
Letting his life roll out again, along the history of the world: it was, Perlmann thought, like waking up. With every page the need grew to be sure of all the things that had happened throughout all the years in which he had been chiefly preoccupied with himself – trying to use work to banish his fear of failure in life. In the midst of the chatter and laughter from the other tables he felt as if he had, so to speak, been a prisoner of that effort, and as if he were only now coming back. It was like joining the real world. It could have been a liberating, cheering experience, had it not been for the hotel, less than two kilometers away, with the steps, the painted window frames and the crooked pine trees.
Perlmann looked in horror at his watch: ten past nine. He couldn’t turn up to dinner as late as that. Nonetheless, he hurried to pay, and walked quickly back to the hotel, which he entered by the back door for the first time. He had just quietly closed it behind him, when Giovanni came round the corner with a big cardboard box under his arm. ‘
Buona sera
,’ he said genially, and bowed slightly before setting off again. Today Giovanni had his face under control. There was not a hint of yesterday’s grin. But Perlmann thought he sensed behind Giovanni’s expression the laughter of the servant who has caught his master in some unseemly act.
Perlmann had looked forward to turning into the dimly lit corridor upstairs, and in the middle of it, under the unlit lamp, feeling around for the keyhole. So he had been unpleasantly surprised when all the lamps were lit unusually brightly. With his key in his hand, he paced back and forth, before creeping to the cupboard at the end of the corridor and fetching a ladder. With his handkerchief wrapped around his fingers, he half-unscrewed all nine bulbs so that the lighting was just as it had been before.
Tomorrow would be even more about Millar’s first paper than today. Perlmann reluctantly bent down to the round table and flicked through some pages. Then he went to the bathroom and took a sleeping pill from the packet. He broke it in two and, after some hesitation, washed down the biggest part.
When he had given up the Conservatoire, emergency laws had been in place, he thought as he lay in the darkness and listened to the unabated traffic. He had watched the demonstrations from the other side of the street. He felt he should have crossed over. But there were all those people there, and the noisy megaphones, and the rhythmical movement of the crowd, which made one feel one was losing one’s own will. And so, till now, he had never made a political commitment, even though on his internal stage he always advocated very clear and often radical positions. Not even Agnes had known that for a while he had been almost as at home in Spanish anarcho-syndicalism as a historian.
That night he woke up three times, and still he couldn’t escape the leaden power of that accursed word. It was the word
masterclass
, a word that made both his parents freeze with respect as if it were the name of God. Being accepted into the masterclass run by a big name: in their eyes that was the highest attainment possible, and they had no dearer wish for their own son than such a consecration. In the dream that stayed with him even after he was awake, Perlmann didn’t see his parents, and he didn’t hear them utter the word either. It was more as if his parents were there, and the word as well, and the word was carved into their devout silence in huge letters of trepidation.
Only when he had spent several minutes under the shower did he feel the scorn that was finally able to break the power of the word.
7
The awkward question that Perlmann posed in the seminar when he could no longer withstand Millar’s challenging looks was so hair-raisingly naive that Ruge, von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral all turned their heads towards him with a jerk. Millar blinked like someone who thinks he has misheard, and tried to gain some time by writing the question down with slow, painterly movements. Then – as if looking through a long contract a final time before signing – he stared for ages at what he had written, before turning to Perlmann. It was the first time that Perlmann had seen Millar looking uncertain – not uncertain about his subject, but in his attitude towards a question which, first of all, came from a man like Perlmann, but which on the other seemed to be of almost idiotic simplicity. He opted for an emphatically modest, emphatically thoughtful tone, and explained once again to Perlmann what must have been clear to anyone who had read his paper attentively. He was visibly uneasy as he did so. He basically couldn’t believe that Perlmann had really asked that question, and he was afraid of insulting him by taking the question literally. Twice he seemed to have finished. He looked quizzically at Perlmann, and when Perlmann nodded stiffly and said simply, ‘Thank you’, Millar added something to his explanation.
The pill
, Perlmann thought,
I should just have taken the smaller bit.
He rested his head on his hand so that he could rub his temples without anyone noticing. Perhaps that would help against the thumping heaviness that lay over his eyes like a ring of steel. When he took his hand away, he caught the eye of Evelyn Mistral, who was fighting against Millar’s sceptical face with sentences that were growing faster and faster. He nodded, without knowing what they were talking about. When Millar noticed this agreement, he looked like someone who is now utterly confused. Plainly, Evelyn Mistral’s train of thought had nothing to do with the interpretation that he had composed for Perlmann’s puzzlingly naive question.
Perlmann poured himself a cup of coffee, and when he reached into his jacket pocket for the matches, he felt the packet of headache pills. Keeping his hand in his pocket, he pressed out two tablets, brought them inconspicuously to his mouth and swallowed them. As if his head had been cleared merely by the act of swallowing, he concentrated on the formulae in Millar’s paper. With a jolt that he was able to cushion somewhat at the last moment, he sat bolt upright: a bracket was missing from one of the formulae. Struggling to control his excitement, he topped up his coffee.
Don’t make a mistake now
. Methodically, and with painful concentration, he looked through the whole formal part. He could barely believe his eyes: just before the end a quantifier was missing, which not only made the deduction wrong, but actually made the formula nonsensical. His headache had fled, and it was as if his impatient alertness were forcing its way out from within himself and straight onto the paper. He was absolutely sure of his case. Now everything hung on the presentation. With a furtive slowness that he enjoyed more than anything in ages, he lit a cigarette, pushed his chair back and sat down with the paper in his other hand, his legs crossed as if sitting at a pavement café. He saw Millar sitting in the front row of the lecture hall on that earlier occasion, Sheila beside him in her short skirt.
‘I see,’ Laura Sand said, and leaned back. Millar took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It was the first time Perlmann had seen his face without glasses. It was a surprisingly vulnerable face with eyes that had a boyish, almost childlike expression, and for that brief moment, before Millar put his glasses back on, Perlmann wanted to have nothing more to do with his planned attack, but the flash of Millar’s glasses had closed once more over his face, which had looked so defenseless a moment before, and Perlmann seized his moment.
‘Tell me, Brian,’ he began with deceptive mildness, ‘isn’t there a bracket missing from the fourth formula? Right at the beginning, I mean. Otherwise the domain of quantification is too small.’
Millar darted him a quick glance, pressed his glasses firmly on to his nose and frowned as he flicked through the pages.
‘Jenny, Jenny, baby,’ he muttered with ostentatious irritation, ‘why always the formulae? She’s the best secretary in the world,’ he added, glancing round at everyone, ‘but she has a block with formulae. Many thanks, Phil.’
Perlmann waited for him to make a note. ‘One other small thing,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘As it stands, formula ten makes no sense. The deduction isn’t right either.’
His whole chest becoming a soundbox for his heartbeat was something he had never experienced before. Perlmann gripped his knee, tensed his arms and braced himself against the power of his roaring pulse. Millar’s brief, slightly flickering glance was unmistakeable: this was too much, particularly when it came from someone capable of asking such a simple question.
‘Quite frankly, Phil,’ he began imperiously, ‘I can’t see anything there that isn’t completely in order.’
‘I can,’ said Ruge. He scribbled something on the paper and grinned at Millar. ‘There’s a quantifier missing in the middle.’
Now von Levetzov too picked up his pen. His face twitched with a mixture of delight and malice. Millar ran his biro along the line and faltered.
‘Hang on . . . oh yes, OK, there it is,’ he murmured. He added the sign and made another note on his piece of paper. ‘Jenny, baby, we’re going to have to have a serious talk,’ he said as he wrote, and then looked at Perlmann. ‘Of course, I’d have spotted it in the galleys. But still, thanks.’
His polite smile was like a contrasting background designed to make his humorless, unforgiving face stand out.
It wasn’t Jenny. It wasn’t a typo
.
Afterwards, on their way through the drawing room, Millar pushed his way next to Perlmann.
‘That question of yours,’ he said, ‘I have the feeling there was something I didn’t understand. Perhaps we should sit down together.’
‘Absolutely,’ Perlmann replied, and afterwards he had the strange feeling of having said it in a gruff way that was alien to him – almost as if he were Millar.
Was he happy with the new room? Signora Morelli asked him as she handed him the key and the first post from Frau Hartwig.
‘Yes, very much so,’ he replied. He wished her question had sounded less businesslike; he would have liked his sense of complicity with her, which he had felt the previous day, to have lasted a little longer.
In his post there were two lecture invitations and a request for a reference from a student. Perlmann saw the student in front of him, sitting on the edge of his chair with his hands between his knees, looking at him through his thick glasses. The university courtyard was filled with the sluggish, hot silence of an early August afternoon. For more than two hours he had talked through his unsuccessful homework with him. The boy had filled half an exercise book with jagged, frantic handwriting. Then, in the doorway, after stammering an effusive goodbye, he had suddenly bent double, and it had taken Perlmann a moment to work out that this was a deep bow, a minion from another century taking his leave. Leaning against the closed door he had stood there for a long time and considered his office, which he had now been using for seven years: the beautiful desk, the elegant chair behind it, the lamps, the seating area. All of it far too expensive, he had thought, feeling like an interloper in the office of someone who actually did something.
He rang Frau Hartwig and dictated the reference to her, recommending the student for a grant. When she read the text back to him, he was startled by all his unfounded praise. He didn’t dare take it back, and moved on to the letters declining to give the lectures. Yes, he said finally, there was a hint of summer left in the air.
‘You can be glad that you’re down there,’ said Frau Hartwig. ‘The first autumn storms have started up here. Some people can’t suppress their envious remarks. You can imagine which.’
As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Perlmann sat down in the red armchair and picked up Leskov’s paper. But he soon lowered it again.
You are going to write something for Italy, aren’t you?
Frau Hartwig had said at the end of July. Perlmann had only nodded and continued with his business at the shelf. She had, incidentally, postponed her holiday, she explained a few days later. To just before Christmas. After that he had only gone to the office when she wasn’t there, and left her instructions on tape. In late September she had hesitantly asked if she could take two weeks’ holiday, or whether he needed her. ‘Just go,’ he had replied, and by way of disguise he had turned the relief in his voice into enthusiasm for the island of Elba, with which he associated nothing at all apart from Napoleon.
Now there were several pages in Leskov’s paper in which he engaged with the objection that we remember many episodes that we never put in story form. How then could he claim that language played such a key role in the episodic memory?
Leskov’s reply was expressed in eccentric terms, Perlmann thought, but basically the elements of his train of thought were familiar to him, and suddenly the translation started going faster than ever. When he grasped a sentence literally at first glance, he felt as if he had at that moment forgotten it was a Russian sentence – it had yielded its meaning to him with so little resistance. With breathless delight he went on reading. The truth of Leskov’s thesis was irrelevant; the main thing was comprehension. In fact, he noticed, many of the words he had copied out were now in his head. His confidence was growing from one paragraph to the next, and now all of a sudden he also had an incredibly lucky hand when it came to opening the right pages in the dictionary. It bordered on clairvoyance. When he finally had to turn on the light, he was already on page 20.
He could get cigarettes from the place Sandra had bought them from yesterday.
Sandra. The promised stamps from Germany
. He got Frau Hartwig’s envelope out of the waste-paper basket and tore the stamps from it. Then he left the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.
He was late today, the proprietress joked as she brought him the chronicle. He would have to choose something from the menu. Perlmann opened the book at the year when his father hadn’t awoken from his lunchtime nap. The Decca record company had, after listening to demo tapes, reached the view that The Beatles had no future, and turned down the opportunity to produce them. Antonio Segni became Italian president. It was a name that meant nothing to Perlmann, and he read the biographical outline to the smallest detail. Adolf Eichmann was hanged.
His father had lived to hear that. After the report he had turned off the radio in silence, his mother had told him. ‘He wasn’t a sympathizer, you know that,’ she had added. ‘It’s just that he feels somehow under attack when these things are talked about.’ By the graveside she had surprised Perlmann: she, who otherwise wept easily, didn’t shed a single tear.
She had surprised him for a second time the following autumn, this time with her interest in the Cuban crisis, of which he would not have thought her capable. She had, he had felt all winter, seemed better than ever. And then, sometime in the spring, her startlingly rapid decline began. Her world shrank to magazine articles about kitschy German musicals, Kennedy in Berlin interested her not at all, and when he dragged her to see
Irma la Douce
,
she babbled something about pornography on the way home. When he told her about the death of Édith Piaf, she no longer knew who that was, although she had secretly listened to her chansons for years when his father was sitting in the pub with the other post-office workers. She was unaware of the shooting in Dallas. By day she slept with her mouth open, and from ten o’clock she terrorized the night nurse.
When Perlmann arrived at the hospital on the first day of the New Year someone else was already lying in her bed. No, he didn’t want to see her again, he had explained to the nurse, who was alarmed by the edge in his voice. And there had been another faux pas. The graveside ceremony wasn’t quite finished when he lit a cigarette in front of everyone. Why had he not managed to turn that precious moment of liberation into a permanent distinction from all the others, a calm lack of subservience, a fearlessness that needed no dramatic gestures? He laughed to himself and at the same time bit his lips when he thought about how he had simply left the relatives standing outside the pub. To the baffled question of why he hadn’t stayed at the wake, when he was, after all, paying for it, he had said: ‘Chiefly because the word disgusts me.’ Then he had disappeared around the corner.